- Cheri RussoCommunications and Marketing Manager
Lancaster – Six additional television monitors are now hanging up all over Brasee Hall on the Ohio University Lancaster Campus. The new monitors were grant-funded and will be used to educate students about the dangers of prescription drug abuse.

Studies indicate that some college students use a prescription stimulant drug when they feel academic stress, believing that these drugs increase reading comprehension, cognition, and memory.

The Cardinal Health Foundation and The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy have designed interactive toolkits to help reduce the abuse of prescription drugs. The toolkit is designed to help college and university students, faculty and staff on campuses across the country educate others about the misconceptions, realities and dangers of prescription drug abuse among 18-to 25-year olds.

The collegiate toolkit was piloted in August at the 2012 Collegiate Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention Conference at Ohio State. 120 students, faculty and staff from 28 colleges and universities nationwide attended the conference. Following the conference, attendees were encouraged to apply for grants up to $2,500 on behalf of their college/university campuses to increase awareness and implement education and prevention tactics. Seven schools received funding and Ohio University Lancaster was one of them.

"One of the goals of the initiative is to educate the Lancaster and Fairfield County community on the use and misuse of prescription drugs. As an institution of higher education, it's only appropriate that Ohio University Lancaster| Pickerington play a role in this project," said OUL Enrollment Manager Pat Fox.

One of the features of the project is to recognize that a college campus, in some ways, is its own community. Reaching that specific audience is a goal.While other efforts may go on in the larger and more traditional community, directly understanding and providing the right message to OUL students is significant.

"The preliminary work by the group indicates that there is little awareness of the prescription drug problem in our campus community," said Fox. "It is our goal to make our students aware of these issues and provide them with strategies to lead healthy drug-free lives."

The grant money was used to purchase the new monitors. They were installed in May and can be found in several different locations around Brasee Hall. The monitors will display messages about prescription drug abuse, as well as campus announcements and information. The prescription drug abuse messages will be provided by the Young Adult Prevention Initiative.